Compiling EDFBrowser on Windows

"Any program written for Windows platform extends the life of the evil OS." - Richard Stallman (to the best of my memory, but i could not find it online)

Teunis did a great job on making EDFBrowser. I have been using it on Linux for quite a while. But, some of my collaborators need to use it on Windows. So I have to find a solution for them. Luckily, I found a solution after a few hours of struggling and I fully understand that Windows is a bad platform to develop and distribute your software package.

Steps:

1. Install MinGW
The repository to all MinGW downloads is http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw/files/
But, you probably don't need that much. For most people, just go to http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw/ and click the green Download button.

Install as you install most Windows programs. Make sure to check C++ support when asked.

You must read http://www.mingw.org/wiki/InstallationHOWTOforMinGW , which provides you information on how to set environment variables on Windows. You have to do this step.

Log out and then log in - so your environment variable change will be effective.

2. Install Qt (>4.7)

Download a Qt version greater than 4.7 (but not v. 4.8.3). You can download the latest version at http://qt-project.org/downloads  Or, all archived versions at ftp://ftp.qt.nokia.com/qt/source/

Be sure to download the one for Windows platform with MinGW. Do NOT download the source code release unless you know what you are doing.

The one I downloaded is http://releases.qt-project.org/qt4/source/qt-win-opensource-4.8.2-mingw.exe

Do NOT download v. 4.8.3 which has a trivial but annoying bug when you compile EDFBrowser later.

Install Qt as you install most Windows programs. Do NOT forget to set environmental variables according to this: http://sector.ynet.sk/qt4-tutorial/preparations.html

Log out and then log in - so your environment variable change will be effective.

3. Download the source code of EDFBrowser and compile it

You can download EDFBrowser at http://www.teuniz.net/edfbrowser/

Very easy. First, uncompress the source code.  Start a command line terminal on Windows (if you don't know, Google it. - Windows changes its interface from XP to 8 all the time, so I can NOT give you a quick answer.)  Enter the directory where you uncompress EDFBrowser's source code. Now, first type qmake and then type make, like the screenshot below.

I have compiled once. So, it says "nothing to be done."

You should find an exe file called EDFBrowser in bin directory now.

That's it.

Comments are welcome.